


Going Home

by NeoVenus22



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoVenus22/pseuds/NeoVenus22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cragen told him to go home two hours ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going Home

Cragen told him to go home two hours ago. Two hours, thirty-seven minutes, eighteen... nineteen... twenty seconds ago.

He's on the bottom bunk, but he can just see the clock if he turns his gaze slightly to the right. This is his home now. He'd rather be here than anywhere else, because while nothing makes sense here, it makes more sense than anywhere else. Here, he's not in control, but that part's not his fault. There are always hidden secrets, and a cast of characters he hasn't met yet, waiting to lie to him, waiting to give him sobbing confessions, waiting to take him on a twisting roller coaster ride that might just maybe give him an answer, if he's lucky.

But at home —"home"— he's supposed to be in control of his own life, and he can't even manage that anymore. He's forty-two damn years old now, and he should have something. He used to have everything. Great kids, a beautiful and wonderful wife, a promising career. Now he still has the career, but it's hardened him, made him a calloused scab where once there breathed actual flesh. It took everything from him. The pursuit for the truth and justice (and the American damn way) had stolen his family.

He still had Olivia, though.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, they'd talked about soul mates. He'd scoffed at the very idea of soul mates, it was too girly and ridiculous, and something that Maureen would believe, but never Olivia.

That night, he'd stared into the dark. He wasn't as well rested as someone in his profession should have been, but how could he be expected to sleep well at nights, seeing the things he saw? Trying to get away from the hate and the assault and the gore and the never-ending medley of the worst of the worst that always attempted to lull him into fitful sleep, he'd thought about soul mates. Kathy was curled against him, making that sound she made while she slept, a sound that he had always found cute, that had never failed to soothe him. But it couldn't soothe him then. His muscles were still tense from a tough day at work, and then coming home to a fight with his wife. _You need to stop coming home so late. The kids are going to grow up not knowing what you even look like. What were you doing at the precinct all that time, anyway?_

Sitting across from Olivia, the two of them sipping coffees quietly and trying to calm down after the news that a rape victim had committed suicide. It had been before Olivia's time, but Elliot couldn't imagine the girl's face without the aid of a photograph. So she'd stayed. That night, Elliot rubbed his wife's skin under his thumb, and in that still moment, he knew that Olivia Benson was his soul mate.

He'd pushed that thought, that notion, that revelation out of his mind for years, and it only came back to haunt him now, in his moments of utter loneliness, when he slept in an abandoned house that used to be a home, that he thought about it. He'd laughed at the idea then, just as now, that soul mates were destined to find each other above all others. But the idea that there was one person in the world that would truly understand you...

It was Olivia. He'd known it then, and he knew it now. Olivia _knew_ him. Knew him and understood him in a way that Kathy never could.

He suspected he loved Olivia. Well, no, he knew he loved her. But he didn't love her in a conventional sense, in the kind of sense that he would leave his family or his job for her, the way he'd dropped certain things for Kathy. He loved her in such a broad spectrum that he couldn't define their relationship. There were elements of everything, the father and daughter, the mother and son, the brother and sister, the husband and wife. But the various definitions of his love for Olivia changed from moment to moment, bending out of shape and refracting the light and moving back and forth and up and down, like they lived their existence inside a lava lamp.

When everything else sucked (to borrow from Maureen's vocabulary), Olivia was there. That wasn't to say that Olivia didn't on occasion make things suck. But she hadn't left; and Kathy had. He knows he shouldn't compare them. But the both of them are such powerful forces in his life; they exude such love and such warmth when day after day, he is surrounded by criminals and scumbags and the broken souls left behind. Kathy and Olivia, for better or for worse, had given him hope and safety and love. And now one of those pillars was gone, and the monument was crumbling.

There are too many times where Elliot thinks he is losing his mind.

"Elliot, are you in here?"

He's staring at the bottom of a set of standard bunks, but he's now connected with the clock, almost. Two hours, forty-two minutes, thirty-seven... thirty-eight... thirty-nine seconds. The bed jostles near his knees. "Elliot, I thought the captain sent you home."

"Why go home," he says. "There's no one there."

"I'm not going to have this conversation with you again. I know it hurts, I know it's scary, but you have to buck up and face the music." She sounds like she's counseling a victim again, and he almost hates her for it. And still, he can't help but recognize the infallible logic in it. "We need you to be at your best. You can't be at your best if you're moping around and sleeping on these lumpy mattresses." She pats one of the lumps, and unbidden, the smallest twinge of amusement quirks his lips. Olivia rarely misses a beat, and she doesn't miss this one. "There you go. C'mon, get up. We're going to get some coffee, and then you are going to go home and rest."

Olivia waits patiently while he rises and puts on his coat. She even pays for his coffee, and while he doesn't taste it, it warms his throat the same way that Olivia's generosity warms his gut. Cragen told him to go home an hour and a half ago, and he's getting a little closer.


End file.
